Traditional media includes newspapers, magazines, television and radio programs, films, music and the like. Traditional literary works include novels, essays, poems and other composed articles (“compositions” generally). With the advent of the digital age and global computer networks, literary works or compositions have grown to include Web documents, electronic books, e-zines, so-called “White Papers” and a variety of content in combination with text such as hyperlinks, images, graphics, animation, audio/video, bookmarks and multimedia. Such authored work or works (or generally referred to as “content”) is so-called ‘published’ on a global computer network (e.g., the Internet) through Web page locations of a Web site, bulletin boards or other global computer network postings.
Historically such media has been generated centrally by organizations that contract with a small number of contributors (writers, producers), establish an editing organization to select from this content, and then distribute that content through either their own channels (e.g., the New York Times printing service or the ABC broadcast network) or via the public Internet (on sites like NYTimes.com or CNN.com).
Along with global computer network publications, the area of advertising on the global computer networks continues to grow and develop. Current advertising mechanisms include banner ads, pop-up ads and sponsorship columns or textual advertising.